Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.

It just happens that cloud services is IBM's preferred method of selling enterprise software and services.

I think it's a good move. At the very least, they can learn a bit from someone else on how to run a cloud service.

Let me ask you this -- if you didn't already have the Apple hardware that was integrated with iCloud et al, would you pay money to use any of the Apple internet services? Like if they build Windows clients and you had Windows, would you pay to use any of their services?

I can't think of a single Apple service I would pay for if I wasn't on Apple hardware. And even worse, despite the free services from Apple, I will pay to use competitors that offer a worse integration, just to not use the Apple services.

They exist exactly and only to make the user experience of their devices better. They don't make sense outside the Apple ecosystem, and that's how I imagine it's intended to be.

I have a mac and an iPhone and an iPad and I just want to be able to text my wife on any of them and have it work. That means contacts need to be synced, and there needs to be an answer for how the messages are synced between devices. Same with notes/calendars/etc. iCloud is hiding beneath all of it, and the whole point is that you don't see it, you just see your contacts list works everywhere you look.

The alternatives do lack a number of features.

If they are going to improve integration with third party services, I would love to have better integration with Google’s services, not IBM’s..

There is a vacuum in the Enterprise from when Blackberry was the go-to device. This smells of an in-road Apple might be taking to make itself the defacto Mobile Device for Enterprise.

IBM benefits from this by being able to market Watson services easier to App makers.

You use things developed by IBM daily without even knowing it. Barcodes, credit cards, RAM, hard drives, modern microprocessors, airline travel, laser eye surgery, and even relational databases are all possible thanks to advances by IBM. Almost all nanotechnology research utilizes scanning tunneling microscopy which was invented IBM.

IBM Research is usually bleeding edge technology. They work on technology decades before it becomes mainstream. Currently they're doing research in things like High temperature superconductivity, Quantum Computing, and Nanotechnology.

IBM also develops solutions for the financial services industry and are working on Blockchain technologies for the banking system. They're doing advanced AI research. They have healthcare and geo-spatial initiatives as well.

Are the ones porting Go to their UNIX and mainframe variants.

Used to be the biggest contributor to Swift on Linux (not sure about nowadays).

Seat on the ANSI C++ table.

I imagine many Linux kernel goodies are still coming from them.

They are still one of the companies with biggest amount of patents per year.

For your line of work, perhaps not. For the enterprise and government customers, where they make billions, very much so.

Show me any other cloud provider with hosted MongoDB, JanusGraph, Etcd, ScyllaDB, RethinkDB as well as Cloudant itself.

If it wasn't for the pricing I would definitely have considered IBM Cloud for my project.

Apple has proven that a partnership with an established vendor can be their first step into a market they want to own.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.engadget.com/amp/2005/09/07...

IBM has been struggling retaining people and their cloud efforts have been at best a distant fourth (AWS, AZURE and GCE). I tried using it and it had no advantage . At least Microsoft has a nice windows integration and UX and google has good UX and integration into Google services. AWS is the incumbent and what I personally use since I don’t trust Google and Azure doesn’t appeal to me due to my lack of need of Windows.

Yeah, Apple is doomed /s

>Does Apple really think that it would be better to outsource cloud services to IBM than develop their own? To me, it looks like Apple lacks confidence in their own internal abilities, and that’s not a good look.

Apple doesn't outsource their Cloud services to IBM. This story is not about that at all.

(They do use Azure and Google Cloud though, and perhaps Amazon too).

"Cloud services" is a pretty nebulous term. When it comes to ML cloud services I don't think there are any clear leaders. AWS services don't really compare to this.

One can only speculate as to who is the current leader of the cloud ML space, but let's just say that Watson hasn't been warmly received in the past.

But Apple is?

They now have their own fairly large CDN, and growing, likely even more so once they have their own Original TV Programme.

They have the largest Mesos system running in production.

iMessages is likely Third in terms of toal messages sent in Global IM Market Share. First being WeChat, 2nd being Whatsapp.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/converting_...

FWIW, I thought that Watson playing Jeopardy was flat out amazing.

Apple pushes someone else’s stuff: They lack confidence! They look weak!

If they came up with this 5 years ago I might play with it a little longer, but don't the IBM engineers keep up with what's going on at GOOGL, FB or AMZN. I can't possibly imagine anyone using this to develop iPhone apps for the purpose of image recognition, even if it's an offline flow.

If you simply re-read all your own points from an objective standpoint, it should be apparent that this is geared towards individuals who have minimal or no machine learning (much less deep learning) experience; but nevertheless feel they need features like custom image recognition in their application. Rather than spending time and money hiring a 'seasoned ML engineer' such as yourself, they can try this and see if it works well enough for their purposes. Everything from the HTML interface, dearth of model customization, no parameter tuning, etc. points to this use case. Yes, it will be tedious, time consuming, and perhaps a bit unintuitive at first but it will be nowhere near as difficult for them than if they were to build an equivalent data pipeline, neural network, and evaluation setup on specialized hardware using Tensorflow. From that perspective, this could be a great product for application developers.

Finally, there are tons of REST APIs that enumerate all the functionality found here. They are all part of the Watson Cloud catalog. This includes loading data, training, and deploying models. Moreover, is it really necessary to insult IBM engineers by insinuating that they haven't kept up with the broader paradigm shifts in the field? They build what they are told to build by management (just like at the Big 4).

Yet I can't get my head around neural networks and related concepts.

Just because it is easy for you, don't assume the same for everyone else.

"no way to define the layers, the loss function, or any knobs to play around with the network". -- This is the point of the service - to enable the (vast group of) users who want to custom-classify images of X/Y/Z without having to understand the difference between momentum and learning rate, or hire people who do. If you do want full control of the model, you should look at Deep Learning as a Service - https://www.ibm.com/cloud/deep-learning

Outside of that, IBM/Watson seems like a comparatively bad choice of partners.

I remember as part of that partnership IBM released a version of their MobileFirst tooling that was identical to a previous version except it had Android support removed.

Tim, being the savvy executive and decision maker he will always be, concluded that the only logical choice is to make the decision which will virtually nullify his chance of getting fired. "Your legacy shall not go to waste, Steve...", he said under his breath as he picked up the phone.

https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-developer/faq

Resources here.

https://www.ibm.com/cloud/apple-developer/resources

It's a shame Watson's been so disappointing (eg MD Anderson Cancer platform), maybe it can start a support group with Stephen Wolfram...

Can you imagine the company that made this getting into bed with IBM!?

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/04/business/ibm-and-apple-gi...

Since then, the Apple-IBM relationship seems to be the longest “on again, off again” in computing.

Remember PowerPC Macs?